Our catalogue 87 (LXXXVII), the likes of which has not been seen in recent times, contains ten lots, all Flemish manuscripts made between 1270 and 1520, nine of which have extensively illustrated calendars. The oldest of them is a luxury psalter from Bruges, c. 1270, with twelve highly original calendar images, ten (!) full-page miniatures and nine smaller ones in historiated initials; in the 15th century it belonged to the English Restwolde family (according to an entry in the calendar page of May). Psalters from the 13th century with full-page pictures have entirely vanished from private collections (in the last 60 years, only two appeared at auctions, in 1997 and in 2000, and both sold for several millions of pounds). But what makes our psalter even more remarkable are the calendar pictures, with their entrancing irregular shapes, unique thus. 

The second lot is a sensation, too, although only fragmentary. It is a small book of hours by one of the most ingenious masters of the time around 1480, the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book. Our manuscript has seven full-page calendar miniatures (besides 22 more) and is the only one except the (totally ruined) Dresden book to contain such a series. Three more books of Hours, lots three to five, show the various influences of the Dresden Master in their calendar pictures. Lot six is, again, a sensation: a small hours, incomplete alas, with a complete calendar and lots of smaller miniatures by the famous Flemish artist Simon Bening – it is totally unknown and of irresistible attraction, as is lot seven, with a full calendar, also by Simon Bening. The next, lot eight, is the artistic peak of the whole collection, featuring 22 calendar paintings by the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimany Breviary (or rather, as we believe, the one and only Gerard David himself), one of only two such series he painted himself. Circumstantial evidence leads us to think of Marguerite of Austria, the Emperor Maximilian’s daughter, was the one for whom this jewel was commissioned. For more information on this manuscript see our manuscript section.

Lot nine was also made by this great artist and his workshop, but the fact which makes it unique, are more than one thousand painted isolated motifs from botany and fauna that grace the margins of all text pages. Lot ten, as supplement, features eight full-page miniatures by the David master, from a destroyed manuscript (no calendar scenes), all of tremendous beauty; these, as lots two and six, are unknown and here introduced for the first time.